HB 
111 

(sra.Q> 



The Crime of 
Poverty 



myf HENRY GEORGE 




Joseph Fels Fund Edition 




>. .'X'^ * 






\' " 



^ i 






.^'"'y 









o 0^ 






-O ' ' . * s ^ .'\ 












>' 



V>^ .^ 



V^^' 



■p < 



^^^ . o s c 









'•n. v^^ 






CO 






% ;*«, 



. .'°^. 



.x-?-' 



■«k. .-^ 



4" ^'% 









o. 






O ' D « V ■* .U <* 



xO^^ 



o 0^ 






:r 









xO°<. 



,0- 






cOJ-' 









,^^ ^^^. 



' ''^^ 


.^^- : 








1^ 






'c^o' 




^':^v 


c^ -n^ 




nO°.. 










w „ , '^^ * " 


1 » ° <- 








.'^' 








■x*' 




, '-*v 


"C* 


^^- - 







,<>^^ 



,s^' ^n 






^0^ 






V ^' -"' " " '\0^ ^^'''-v ""c-. ' 



A-*-^ .^ 



^ -»='^ 



The Crime of Poverty 



The Crime of Poverty 



BY 

HENRY GEORGE 



AN ADDRESS 

Delivered in the Opera House, Burlington, Iowa, April 1, 1885, 

under the auspices of Burlington Assembly, No. 3135, 

Knights of Labor, which afterwards distributed 

fifty thousand copies in tract form 



T. .£ JOSEPH PELS FUND OF AMERICA 
Cincinnali, Ohio 



By iui^ouaiiga 

F E8 Bo 1929 



HE)!7I 



The Crime of Poverty 



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : I propose to talk to 
J you tonight of the Crime of Poverty. I cannot, in 
a short time, hope to convince you of much ; but 
the thing of things I should like to show you is that 
poverty is a crime. I do not mean that it is a crime to be 
poor. Murder is a crime ; but it is not a crime to be 
murdered; and a man who is in poverty I look upon 
not as a criminal in himself so much as the victim of 
a crime for which others, as well, perhaps, as himself, 
are responsible. That poverty is a curse, the bitterest of 
curses, we all know. Carlyle was right when he said that 
the hell of which Englishmen were most afraid was the 
hell of poverty ; and this is true, not of Englishmen alone, 
but of people all over the civilized world, no matter what 
their nationality. It is to escape this hell that we strive 
and strain and struggle ; and work on oftentimes in blind 
habit long after the necessity for work is gone. 

The curse born of poverty is not confined to tlie poor 
alone; it runs through all classes, even to the very rich. 
They, too, suffer; they must suffer; for there cannot be 
suffering in a community from which any class can 
totally escape. The vice, the crime, the ignorance, the 
meanness, born of poverty, poison, so to speak, the very 
air which rich and poor alike must breathe. 

I walked down one of your streets this morning, and 
I saw three men going along with tlieir hands chained 
together. I knew for certain that those men were not 



6 The Crime of Poverty. 

rich men; and, although I do not know the offense for 
which they were carried in chains through your streets, 
this, I think, I can safely say, that, if you trace it up you 
will find it in some way to spring from poverty. Nine- 
tenths of human misery, I think you will find, if you 
look, to be due to poverty. If a man chooses to be poor, 
he commits no crime in being poor, provided his poverty 
hurts no one but himself. If a man has others dependent 
upon him; if there are a wife and children whom it is 
his duty to support, then, if he voluntarily chooses pov- 
erty, it is a crime — aye, and I think that, in most cases, 
the men who have no one to support but themselves are 
men that are shirking their duty. A woman comes into 
the world for every man ; and for every man who lives a 
single life, caring only for himself, there is some woman 
who is deprived of her natural supporter. But while a 
man who chooses to be poor cannot be charged with 
crime, it is certainly a crime to force poverty on others. 
And it seems to me clear that the great majority of those 
who suffer from poverty are poor not from their own 
particular faults, but because of conditions imposed by 
society at large. Therefore, I hold that poverty is a 
crime — not an individual crime, but a social crime; a 
crime for which we all, poor as well as rich,, are re- 
sponsible. 

Two or three weeks ago I went one Sunday evening 
to the church of a famous Brooklyn preacher. Mr. 
Sankey was singing, and something like a revival was 
going on there. The clergyman told some anecdotes 
connected with the revival, and recounted some of the 
reasons why men failed to become Christians. One case 



The Crime of Poverty. 7 

he mentioned struck me. He said he had noticed on the 
outskirts of the congregation, night after night, a man 
who listened intently, and who gradually moved forward. 
One night, the clergyman said, he went to him, saying, 
"My brother, are you not ready to become a Christian?" 
The man said, no he Avas not. He said it, not in a 
defiant tone, but in a sorrowful tone. The clergyman 
asked him why, whether he did not believe in the truths 
he had been hearing? Yes, he believed them all. Why, 
then, wouldn't he become a Christian? "Well," he said, 
"I can't join the church without giving up my business ; 
and it is necessary for the support of my wife and 
children. If I give that up, I don't know how in the 
world I can get along. I had a hard time before I found 
my present business, and I cannot afford to give it up. 
Yet, I can't become a Christian without giving it up." 
The clergyman asked, "Are you a rum-seller?" No, he 
was not a rum-seller. Well, the clergyman said, he didn't 
know what in the world the man could be ; it seemed to 
him that a rum-seller was the only man who does a 
business that would prevent his becoming a Christian; 
and he finally said, "What is your business?" The man 
said, "I sell soap." "Soap !" exclaimed the clergyman, 
"you sell soap ? How in the world does that prevent you 
becoming a Christian ?" "Well," the man said, "it is this 
way; the soap I sell is one of these patent soaps that are 
extensively advertised as enabling you to clean clothes 
very quickly ; as containing no deleterious compound 
whatever. Every cake of the soap I sell is wrapped in a 
paper on which is printed a- statement that it contains no 
injurious chemicals, whereas the truth of the matter is 



8 The Crime of Poverty. 

that it does, and that though it will take the dirt out of 
the clothes pretty quickly, it will, in a little while, rot 
them completely out. I have to make my living in this 
way ; and I cannot feel that I can become a Christian if 
I sell that soap." The minister went on, describing how 
he labored unsuccessfully with that man, and finally wound 
up by saying, "He stuck to his soap, and lost his soul." 

But, if that man lost his soul, was it his fault alone? 
Whose fault is it that social conditions are such that men 
have to make that terrible choice between what con- 
science tells them is right, and the necessity of earning a 
living? I hold that it is the fault of society; that it is the 
fault of us all. Pestilence is a curse. The man who 
would bring cholera to this country, or the man who, 
having the power to prevent its coming here, would make 
no effort to do so, would be guilty of a crime. Poverty is 
worse than cholera ; poverty kills more people than pesti- 
lence, even in the best of times. Look at the death 
statistics of our cities ; see where the deaths come quick- 
est ; see where it is that little children die like flies — it is 
in the poorer quarters. And the man who looks with 
careless eyes upon the ravages of this pestilence, the man 
who does not set himself to stay and eradicate it, he, I 
say, is guilty of a crime. 

If poverty is appointed by the power which is above 
us all, then it is no crime ; but if poverty is unnecessary, 
then it is a crime for which society is responsible, and for 
which society must suffer. 

I hold, and I think no one who looks at the facts 
can fail to see, that poverty is utterly unnecessary. It is 
not by the decree of the Almighty, but it is because of our 



The Crime of Poverty. 9 

own injustice, our own selfishness, our own ignorance, 
that this scourge, worse than any pestilence, ravages our 
civilization, bringing want and suflfering and degradation, 
destroying souls as well as bodies. Look over the world, 
in this hey-day of nineteenth century civilization. In 
every civilized country under the sun you will find men 
and women whose condition is worse than that of the 
savage; men and women and little children with whom 
the veriest savage could not aflford to exchange. Even 
in this new city of yours, with virgin soil around you, 
you have had this winter to institute a relief society. 
Your roads have been filled with tramps, fifteen, I am 
told, at one time taking shelter in a round-house here. 
As here, so everywhere, and poverty is deepest where 
wealth most abounds. 

What more unnatural than this ? There is nothing in 
nature like this poverty which today curses us. We see 
rapine in nature ; we see one species destroying another ; 
but as a general thing animals do not feed on their own 
kind; and, wherever we see one kind enjoying plenty, all 
individuals of that kind share it. No man, I think, ever 
sav^ a herd of buflFalo, of which a few were fat and the 
great majority lean. No man ever saw a flock of birds, 
of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the 
others all skin and bone. Nor in savage life is there 
anything like the poverty that festers in our civilization. 

In a rude state of society there are seasons of want, 
seasons when people starve; but they are seasons when 
the earth has refused to yield her increase, when the rain 
has not fallen from the heavens, or when the land has 
been swept by some foe — not when there is plenty ; and 



lo The Crime of Poverty. 

yet the peculiar characteristic of this modern poverty of 
ours is, that it is deepest where wealth most abounds. 

Why, today, while over the civilized world there is 
so much distress, so much want? what is the cry that 
goes up? What is the current explanation of the hard 
times? Over-production! There are so many clothes 
that men must go ragged ; so much coal that in the bitter 
winters people have to shiver ; such over-filled granaries 
that people actually die by starvation! Want due to 
over-production ! Was a greater absurdity ever uttered ? 
How can there be over-production till all have enough? 
It is not over-production, it is unjust distribution. 

Poverty necessary ! Why, think of the enormous 
powers that are latent in the human brain ! Think how 
invention enables us to do with the power of one man, 
what not long ago could not be done by the power of a 
thousand. Think that in England alone, the steam ma- 
chinery in operation is said to exert a productive force 
greater than the physical force of the population of the 
world, were they all adults. And yet we have only begun 
to invent and discover. We have not yet utilized all that 
has already been invented and discovered. And look at 
the powers of the earth. They have hardly been touched. 
In every direction as we look, new resources seem to 
open, Man's ability to produce vv^ealth seems almost 
infinite — we can set no bounds to it. Look at the power 
that is flowing by your city in the current of the Missis- 
sippi that might be set at work for you. So in every 
direction energy that we might utilize goes to waste; 
resources that we might draw upon are untouched. Yet 
men are delving and straining to satisfy mere animal 
wants ; women are working, working, working their lives 



The Crime of Poverty. ii 

away, and too frequently turning in despair from that hard 
struggle to cast away all that makes the charm of woman. 

If the animals can reason, what must they think of 
us? Look at one of those great ocean steamers plough- 
ing her way across the Atlantic, against wind, against 
wave, absolutely setting at defiance the utmost power of 
the elements. If the gulls that hover over her were 
thinking beings, could they imagine that the animal that 
could create such a structure as that could actually want 
for enough to eat? Yet, so it is. How many even of 
those of us who find life easiest are there who really live 
a rational life? Think of it, you who believe that there 
is only one life for man — what a fool at the very best is 
a man to pass his life in this struggle to merely live? And 
you who believe, as I believe, that this is not the last of 
man, that this is a life that opens but another life, think 
how nine-tenths, aye, I do not know but ninety-nine 
hundredths of all our vital powers are spent in a mere 
effort to get a living ; or to heap together that which we 
cannot by any possibility take away. Take the life of 
the average workingman. Is that the life for which the 
human brain was intended and the human heart was 
made? Look at the factories scattered through our 
country. They are little better than penitentiaries. 

I read in the New York papers a while ago that the 
girls at the Yonkers factories had struck. The papers 
said that the girls did not seem to know why they had 
struck, and intimated that it must be just for the fun of 
striking. Then came out the girls' side of the story, and 
it appeared that they had struck against the rules in 
force. They were fined if they spoke to one another, 
and they were fined still more heavily if they laughed. 



I a The Crime of Poverty. 

There was a heavy fine for being a minute late. I visited 
a lady in Philadelphia who had been a forewoman in 
various factories, and I asked her, "Is it possible that 
such rules are enforced?" She said it was so in Phila- 
delphia. There is a fine for speaking to your next neigh- 
bor, a fine for laughing; and she told me that the girls in 
one place v/here she was employed were fined ten cents a 
minute for being late, though many of them had to come 
for miles in winter storms. She told me of one poor girl 
who really worked hard one week and made $3.50, but 
the fines against her were $5.25. That seems ridiculous ; 
it is ridiculous, but it is pathetic, and it is shameful. 

But take the cases of those even who are compara- 
tively independent and well off. Here is a man working 
hour after hour, day after day, week after week, in doing 
one thing over and over again, and for v/hat? Just to 
live. He is working ten hours a day in order that he 
may sleep eight, and may have two or three hours for 
himself when he is tired out and all his faculties are 
exhausted. That is not a reasonable life; that is not a 
life for a being possessed of the powers that are in man, 
and I think every man must have felt it for himself. I 
know that when I first went to my trade I thought to 
myself that it was incredible that a man was created to 
work all day long just to live. I used to read the Scien- 
tific American, and as invention after invention was 
heralded in that paper, I used to think to myself that 
when I became a man it would not be necessary to work 
so hard. But, on the contrary, the struggle for existence 
has become more and more intense. People who want to 
prove the contrary get up masses of statistics to show 
that the condition of the working classes is improving. 



The Crime of Poverty. 13 

Improvement that you have to take a statistical micro- 
scope to discover does not amount to anything. But there 
is no improvement. 

Improvement ! Why, according to the last report of 
the Michigan Bureau of Labor Statistics, as I read yes- 
terday in a Detroit paper, taking all the trades, including 
some of the very high priced ones, where the wages are 
from $6 to $7 a day, the average earnings amount to 
$1.77, and taking out waste time, to $1.40. Now when 
you consider how a man can live and bring up a family 
on $1.40 a day, even in Michigan, I do not think you will 
conclude that the condition of the working classes can 
have very much improved. 

Here is a broad general fact that is asserted by all 
who have investigated the question, by such men as 
Hallam, the historian, and Professor Thorold Rogers, 
who has made a study of the history of prices as they 
were five centuries ago. When all the productive arts 
were in the most primitive state, when the most prolific 
of our modern vegetables had not been introduced, when 
the breeds of cattle were small and poor, when there 
were hardly any roads, and transportation was exceed- 
ingly difficult, when all manufacturing was done by 
hand — in that rude time the condition of the laborers of 
England was far better than it is today. In those rude 
times no man need fear want save when actual famine 
came, and owing to the difficulties of transportation the 
plenty of one district could not relieve the scarcity of 
another. Save in such times no man need fear want. 
Pauperism, such as exists in modern times, was abso- 
lutely unknown. Every one, save the physically disabled, 
could make a living, and the poorest lived in rude plenty. 



14 The Crime of Poverty. 

But, perhaps, the most astonishing fact brought to light 
by this investigation is that at that time, under those 
conditions, in those "dark ages," as we call them, the 
working day was only eight hours. While, with all our 
modern inventions and improvements, our working 
classes have been agitating and struggling in vain to get 
the working day reduced to eight hours. 

Do these facts show improvement? Why, in the 
rudest state of society, in the most primitive state of the 
arts, the labor of the natural bread-winner will suffice to 
provide a living for himself and for those who are de- 
pendent upon him. Amid all our inventions there are 
large bodies of men who cannot do this. What is the 
most astonishing thing in our civilization? Why, the 
most astonishing thing to those Sioux chiefs who were 
recently brought from the Far West and taken through 
our manufacturing cities in the East, was not the marvel- 
ous inventions that enabled machinery to act almost as 
if it had intellect; it was not the growth of our cities; it 
was not the speed with which the railway car whirled 
along ; it was not the telegraph or the telephone that most 
astonished them, but the fact that amid this marvelous 
development of productive power, they found little chil- 
dren at work. And astonishing that ought to be to us ; 
a most astounding thing ! 

Talk about improvement in the condition of the 
working classes, when the facts are that a larger and 
larger proportion of women and children are forced to 
toil. Why, I am told that, even here in your own city, 
there are children of thirteen and fourteen working in 
factories. In Detroit, according to the report of the 
Michigan Bureau of Labor Statistics, one-half of the 



The Crime of Poverty. 15 

children of school age do not go to school. In New 
Jersey, the report made to the legislature discloses an 
amount of misery and ignorance that is appalling. Chil- 
dren are growing up there, compelled to monotonous toil 
when they ought to be at play; children who do not know 
how to play ; children who have been so long accustomed 
to work that they have become used to it ; children grow- 
ing up in such ignorance that they do not know what 
country New Jersey is in, that they never heard of 
George Washington, that some of them think Europe is 
in New York. Such facts are appalling ; they mean that 
the very foundations of the republic are being sapped. 
The dangerous man is not the inan who tries to excite 
discontent; the dangerous man is the man who says that 
all is as it ought to be. Such a state of things cannot 
continue ; such tendencies as we see at work here cannot 
go on without bringing at last an overwhelming crash. 

I say that all this poverty and the ignorance that 
flows from it is unnecessary; I say that there is no 
natural reason why we should not all be rich, in the sense, 
not of having more than each other, but in the sense of 
all having enough to completely satisfy all physical 
wants; of all having enough to get such an easy living 
that we could develop the better part of humanity. There 
is no reason why wealth should not be so abundant, that 
no one should think of such a thing as little children at 
work, or a woman compelled to a toil that nature never 
intended her to perform; wealth so abundant that there 
would be no cause for that harassing fear that sometimes 
paralyzes even those who are not considered "the poor," 
the fear that every man of us has probably felt, that if 
sickness should smite him, or if he should be taken 



1 6 The Crime of Poverty. 

away, those whom he loves better than his hfe would 
become charges upon charity. "Consider the lilies of the 
field, how they grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin." 
I believe that in a really Christian community, in a 
society that honored not with the lips but with the act, 
the doctrines of Jesus, no one would have occasion to 
worry about physical needs any more than do the lilies of 
the field. There is enough and to spare. The trouble is 
that, in this mad struggle, we trample in the mire what 
has been provided in sufficiency for us all; trample it in 
the mire while we tear and rend each other. 

There is a cause for this poverty, and if you trace it 
down, you will find its root in a primary injustice. Look 
over the world today — poverty everywhere. The cause 
must be a common one. You cannot attribute it to the 
tariff, or to the form of government, or to this thing or to 
that in which nations differ; because, as deep poverty is 
common to them all, the cause that produces it must be a 
common cause. What is that common cause? There is 
one sufficient cause that is common to all nations; and 
that is, the appropriation as the property of some, of that 
natural element on which and from which, all must live. 

Take that fact I have spoken of, that appalling fact 
that, even now, it is harder to live than it was in the 
ages dark and rude five centuries ago — how do you 
explain it? There is no difficulty in finding the cause. 
Whoever reads the history of England, or the history 
of any other civilized nation (but I speak of the history 
of England because that is the history with which we 
are best acquainted) will see the reason. For century 
after century a Parliament composed of aristocrats and 
employers passed laws endeavoring to reduce wages, but 



The Crime of Poverty. 17 

in vain. Men could not be crowded down to wages that 
gave a mere living because the bounty of nature was not 
wholly shut up from them ; because some remains of 
the recognition of tlie truth that all men have equal rights 
on the earth still existed ; because the land of that coun- 
try, that which was held in private possession, was only 
held on a tenure derived from the nation, and for a rent 
payable back to the nation. The church lands supported 
the expenses of public worship, of the maintenance of 
seminaries, and the care of the poor ; the crown lands 
defrayed the expenses of the civil list; and from a third 
portion of the lands, those held under military tenures, 
the army was provided for. There was no national debt 
in England at that time. They carried on wars for 
hundreds of years, but at the charge of the landowners. 
And, more important still, there remained everywhere, 
and you can see in every old English town their traces 
to this day, the common lands to which any of the neigh- 
borhood was free. It was as those lands were enclosed ; 
it was as the commons were gradually monopolized, as 
the church lands were made the prey of greedy courtiers, 
as the crown lands were given away as absolute property 
to the favorites of the king, as the military tenants 
shirked their rents, and laid the expenses they had agreed 
to defray upon the nation in taxation, that bore upon 
industry and upon thrift — it was then that poverty began 
to deepen, and the tramp appeared in England, just as 
today he is appearing in our new States. 

Now, think of it — is not land monopolization a suffi- 
cient reason for poverty? What is man? In the first 
place, he is an animal, a land animal, who cannot live 
without land. All that man produces comes from land, 



1 8 The Crime of Poverty. 

all productive labor in the final analysis consists in work- 
ing up land ; or materials are drawn from land into such 
forms as fit them for the satisfaction of human wants 
and desires. Why, man's very body is drawn from the 
land. Children of the soil, we come from the land, and 
to the land we must return. Take away from man all 
that belongs to the land, and what have you but a dis- 
embodied spirit? Therefore, he who holds the land on 
which and from which another man must live, is that 
man's master; and the man is his slave. The man who 
holds the land on which I must live can command me to 
life or to death just as absolutely as though I were his 
chattel. Talk about abolishing slavery — ;we have not 
abolished slavery — we have only abolished one rude form 
of it, chattel slavery. There is a deeper and more 
insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to 
abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a 
virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him with 
the name of freedom. Poverty ! want ! they will sting 
as much as the lash. Slavery ! God knows there are 
horrors enough in slavery; but there are deeper horrors 
in our civilized society today. Bad as chattel slavery 
was, it did not drive slave mothers to kill their children, 
yet you may read in official reports that the system of 
child insurance, which has taken root so strongly in 
England, and which is now spreading over our Eastern 
States, has perceptibly and largely increased the rate of 
child mortality! — What does that mean? 

Robinson Crusoe, as you know, when he rescued 
Friday from the cannibals, made him his slave. Friday 
had to serve Crusoe. But, supposing Crusoe had said, 



The Crime of Poverty. 19 

"Oh, man and brother, I am very glad to see you, and I 
welcome you to this island, and you shall be a free and 
independent citizen, with just as much to say as I have — 
except that this island is mine — and, of course, as I can 
do as I please with my own property, you must not use 
it save upon my terms," Friday would have been just as 
much Crusoe's slave as though he had called him one. 
Friday was not a fish, he could not swim ofif through the 
sea; he was not a bird, and could not fly ofif through the 
air; if he lived at all, he had to live on that island. And 
if that island was Crusoe's, Crusoe was his master 
through life to death. 

A friend of mine, who believes as I do upon this 
question, was talking a while ago with another friend of 
mine who is a greenbacker, but who had not paid much 
attention to the land question. " Our greenbacker friend 
said, "Yes, yes, the land question is an important ques- 
tion; oh, I admit that the land question is a very im- 
portant question ; but then there are other important ques- 
tions. There is this question, and that question, and the 
other question; and there is the money question. The 
money question is a very important question; it is a 
more important question than the land question. You 
give me all the money, and you can take all the land." 
My friend said, "Well, suppose you had all the money in 
the world and I had all the land in the world, what would 
you do if I were to give you notice to quit?" 

Do you know that I do not think the average man 
realizes what land is? I know a little girl who has been 
going to school for some time, studying geography, and 
all that sort of tiling ; and one day she said to me : "Here 



20 The Crime of Poverty, 

is something about the surface of the earth. I wonder 
what the surface of the earth looks like?" "Well," I 
said, "look out into the yard there. That is the surface 
of the earth." She said, "That the surface of the earth ? 
Our yard the surface of the earth? Why, I never 
thought of it !" That is very much the case not only with 
grown men, but with such wise beings as newspaper 
editors. They seem to think, when you talk of land, that 
you always refer to farms ; to think that the land question 
is a question that relates entirely to farmers, as though 
land had no other use than growing crops. Now, I 
should like to know how a man could even edit a news- 
paper without having the use of some land. He might 
swing himself by straps and go up in a balloon, but he 
could not even then get along without land. What sup- 
ports the balloon in the air? Land; the surface of the 
earth. Let the earth drop, and what would become of 
the balloon? The air that supports the balloon is sup- 
ported in turn by land. So it is with everything else men 
can do. Whether a man is working away three thousand 
feet under the surface of the earth, or whether he is 
working up in the top of one of those immense buildings 
they have in New York, whetlier he is ploughing the soil 
or sailing across the ocean, he is still using land. 

Land! Why, in owning a piece of ground, what do 
you own? The lawyers will tell you that you own from 
the center of the earth right up to heaven ; and, so far as 
all human purposes go, you do. In New York tliey are 
building houses thirteen and fourteen stories high. What 
are men, living in those upper stories, paying for ? There 
is a friend of mine who has an office in one of them, and 
he estimates that he pays by the cubic foot for air. Well, 



The Crime of Poverty. 21 

the man who owns the surface of the land has the renting 
of the air up there, and would have if the buildings were 
carried up for miles. 

This land question is the bottom question. Man is a 
land animal. Suppose you want to build a house ; can 
you build it without a place to put it? What is it built 
of? Stone, or mortar, or wood, or iron — they all come 
from the earth. Think of any article of wealth you 
choose, any of those things which men struggle for, 
where do they come from? From the land. It is the 
bottom question. 

The land question is simply the labor question ; and 
when some men own that element from which all wealth 
must be drawn, and upon which all must live, then they 
have the power of living without work, and, therefore, 
those who do work get less of the products of work. 

Did you ever think of the utter absurdity and strange- 
ness of the fact that, all over the civilized world, the 
working classes are the poor classes? Go into any city 
in the world, and get into a cab, and ask the man to 
drive you to where the working people live; he won't 
take you to where the fine houses are ; he will take you, 
on the contrary, into the squalid quarters, tlie poorer 
quarters. Did you ever think how curious that is? 
Think for a moment how it would strike a rational being 
who had never been on the earth before, if such an intelli- 
gence could come down, and you were to explain to him 
how we live on earth, how houses, and food and clothing, 
and all the many things we need, are all produced by 
work, would he not think that the working people would 
be the people who lived in the finest houses and had 
most of everything that work produces? Yet, whether 



22 The Crime of Poverty. 

you took him to London or Paris, or New York, or even 
to Burlington, he would find that those called working 
people were the people who lived in the poorest houses. 

All this is strange— just think of it. We naturally 
despise poverty; and it is reasonable that we should. I 
do not say— I distinctly repudiate it— that the people who 
are poor are poor always from their own fault, or even 
in most cases ; but it ought to be so. If any good man or 
woman had the power to create a world, it would be a 
sort of a world in which no one would be poor unless he 
was lazy or vicious. But that is just precisely the kind 
of a world that this is; that is just precisely the kind of 
a world that the Creator has made. Nature gives to 
labor, and to labor alone; there must be human work 
before any article of wealth can be produced; and, in a 
natural state of things, the man who toiled honestly and 
well would be the rich man, and he who did not work would 
be poor. We have so reversed the order of nature, that we 
are accustomed to think of a workingman as a poor man. 

And if you trace it out I believe you will see that the 
primary cause of this is that we compel those who work 
to pay others for permission to do so. You buy a coat, 
a horse, a house ; there you are paying the seller for labor 
exerted, for something that he has produced, or that he 
has got from the man who did produce it ; but when you 
pay a man for land, what are you paying him for ? You 
pay him for something that no man produced ; you pay 
him for something that was here before man was, or for 
a value that was created, not by him individually, but by 
the community of which you are a part. What is the 
reason that the land here, where we stand tonight, is 
worth more than it was twenty-five years ago ? What is 



The Crime of Poverty. 23 

the reason that land in the center of New York, that once 
could be bought by the mile for a Jug of whiskey, is now 
worth so much that, though you were to cover it with 
gold, you would not have its value ? Is it not because of 
the increase of population? Take away that population, 
and where would the value of the land be? Look at it 
in any way you please. 

We talk about over-production. How can there be 
such a thing as over-production while people want? All 
these things that are said to be over-produced are desired 
by many people. Why do they not get them? They do 
not get them because they have not the means to buy 
them; not that they do not want them. Why have they 
not the means to buy them ? They earn too little. When 
great masses of men have to work for an average of 
$1.40 a day, it is no wonder that great quantities of goods 
cannot be sold. 

Now, why is it that men have to work for such low 
wages? Because, if they were to demand higher wages, 
there are plenty of unemployed men ready to step into 
their places. It is this mass of unemployed men who 
compel that fierce competition that drives wages down 
to the point of bare subsistence. Why is it that there are 
men who cannot get employment? Did you ever think 
what a strange thing it is that men cannot find employ- 
ment? Adam had no difficulty in finding employment; 
neither had Robinson Crusoe ; the finding of employment 
was the last thing that troubled them. 

If men cannot find an employer, why can they not 
employ themselves? Simply because they are shut out 
from the element on which human labor can alone be 
exerted; men are compelled to compete with each other 



24 The Crime of Poverty. 

for the wages of an employer, because they have been 
robbed of the natural opportunities of employing them- 
selves; because they cannot find a piece of God's world 
on which to work without paying some other human 
creature for the privilege. 

I do not mean to say that, even after you had set 
right this fundamental injustice, there would not be many 
things to do ; but this I do mean to say, that our treatment 
of land lies at the bottom of all social questions. This I 
do mean to say, that, do what you please, reform as you 
may, you never can get rid of widespread poverty so long 
as the element on which, and from which, all men must 
live is made the private property of some men. It is 
utterly impossible. Reform government — get taxes down 
to the minimum — build railways ; institute co-operative 
stores; divide profits, if you choose, between employers 
and employed — and what will be the result? The result 
will be that land will increase in value — that will be the 
result — that and nothing else. Experience shows this. 
Do not all improvements simply increase the value of 
land — the price that some must pay others for the privi- 
lege of living? 

Consider the matter. I say it with all reverence, and 
merely say it because I wish to impress a truth upon your 
minds — it is utterly impossible, so long as His laws are 
what they are, that God Himself could relieve poverty — 
utterly impossible. Think of it, and you will see. Men 
pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty 
comes not from God's laws — it is blasphemy of the worst 
kind to say that; it comes from man's injustice to his 
fellows. Supposing the Almighty were to hear the 
prayer, how could He carry out the request, so long as 



The Crime of Poverty. 25 

His laws are what they are? Consider — the Almighty 
gives Lts nothing of the things that constitute wealth ; 
He merely gives us the raw material, which must be 
utilized by man to produce wealth. Does He not give us 
enough of that now? How could He relieve poverty 
even if He were to give us more? Supposing, in answer 
to these prayers, He were to increase the power of the 
sun, or the virtues of the soil? Supposing He were to 
make plants more prolific, or animals to produce after 
their kind more abundantly ? Who would get the benefit 
of it ? Take a country where land is completely monopo- 
lized, as it is in most of the civilized countries — who 
would get the benefit of it? Simply the landowners. 
And even if God, in answer to prayer, were to send down 
out of the heavens those things that men require, who 
would get the benefit? 

In the Old Testament we are told that, when the 
Israelites journeyed through the desert, they were hun- 
gered, and that God sent down out of the heavens — 
manna. There was enough for all of them, and they all 
took it and were relieved. But, supposing that desert had 
been held as private property, as the soil of Great Britain 
is held ; as the soil even of our new States is being held. 
Supposing that one of the Israelites had a square mile, 
and another one had twenty square miles, and another 
one had a hundred square miles, and the great majority 
of the Israelites did not have enough to set the soles of 
their feet upon, which they could call their own — what 
would become of the manna? What good would it have 
done to the majority? Not a whit. Though God had 
sent down manna enough for all, that manna would 
have been the property of the landholders; they would 



26 The Crime of Poverty. 

have employed some of the others, perhaps, to gather it 
up in heaps for them, and would have sold it to the 
hungry brethren. Consider it: this purchase and sale of 
manna might have gone on until the majority of the 
Israelites had given up all they had, even to the clothes 
off their backs. What then ? Well, then they would not 
have had anything left with which to buy manna, and the 
consequence would have been that while they went 
hungry the manna would be lying in great heaps, and the 
landowners would be complaining about the over-produc- 
tion of manna. There would have been a great harvest 
of manna and hungry people, just precisely the phenom- 
enon that we see today. 

I cannot go over all the points I would like to; but 
I wish to call your attention to the utter absurdity of 
private property in land ! Why, consider it — the idea 
of a man selling the earth — the earth, our common 
mother. A man selling that which no man produced. 
A man passing title from one generation to another. 
Why, it is the most absurd thing in the world. Did you 
ever think of this ? What right has a dead man to land ? 
For whom was this earth created? It was created for 
the living, certainly not for the dead. Well, now, we 
treat it as though it was created for the dead. Where do 
our land titles come from? They come from men who, 
for the most part, have passed and gone. Here, in this 
new country, you get a little nearer the original source; 
but go to the Eastern States, and go over the Atlantic- 
There you may clearly see the power that comes from 
landownership. 

As I say, the man that owns the land is the master 
of those who must live on it. Here is a modern instance : 



The Crime of Poverty. 27 

you who are familiar with the history of the Scottish 
Church know that in the forties there was a disruption in 
the church. You who have read Hugh Miller's work on 
The Cruise of the Betsey know something about it; how 
a great body, led by Dr. Chalmers, came out from the 
Established Church and said they would set up a Free 
Church. In the Established Church were a great many 
of the landowners. Some of them, like the Duke of 
Buccleuch, owning miles and miles of land on which no 
common Scotsman had a right to put his foot save by 
die Duke of Buccleuch's permission. These landowners 
refused not only to allow these Free Churchmen to have 
ground upon w^hich to erect a church, but they would 
not let them stand on their land and worship God. You 
who have read The Cruise of the Betsey know that it is 
the story of a clergyman who was obliged to make his 
home in a boat on the wild sea, because he was not 
allowed to have land enough to live on. In many places 
the people had to take the Sacrament with the tide 
coming to their knees — many a man lost his life worship- 
ping on the roads, in the rain and snow. They were not 
permitted to go on Mr. Landlord's land and worship 
God, and had to take to the roads. The Duke of 
Buccleuch stood out for seven years, compelling people 
to worship on the roads, until finally, relenting a little, 
he allowed them to do so in a gravel pit ; whereupon they 
passed a resolution of thanks to his Grace. 

But that is not what I wanted to tell you. The thing 
that struck me was this significant fact: as soon as the 
disruption occurred the Free Church, composed of a 
great many able men, at once sent a deputation to tlie 



28 The Crime of Poverty. 

landlords to ask permission for Scotsmen to worship 
God in Scotland and in their own way. This deputation 
set out for London — they had to go to London, England, 
to get permission for Scotsmen to worship God in Scot- 
land and in their own native home ! 

But that is not the most absurd thing. In one place, 
when they were refused land upon which to stand and 
worship God, the late landowner had died and his estate 
was in the hands of the trustees, and the answer of the 
trustees was that, so far as they were concerned, they 
would exceedingly like to allow them to have a place to 
put up a church to worship, but they could not con- 
scientiously do it, because they knew that such a course 
would be very displeasing to the late Mr. Monaltie ! 
Now, this dead man had gone to heaven, let us hope; at 
any rate he had gone away from this world, but, lest it 
might displease him, men yet living could not worship 
God. Is it possible for absurdity to go any further? 

You may say that those Scottish people are a very 
absurd people, but they are not a whit more so than we 
are; I read only a little while ago of some Long Island 
fishermen who had been paying as rent for the privilege 
of fishing there, a certain part of the catch. They paid 
it because they believed that James II., a dead man 
centuries ago, a man who never put his foot in America, 
a king who was kicked off the English throne, had said 
they had to pay it, and they got up a committee, went to 
the county town and searched the records. They could 
not find anything in the records to show that James II. 
had ever ordered that they should give any of their fish 
to anybody, and so they refused to pay any longer. But 



The Crime of Poverty. 29 

if they had found that James II. had really said they 
should, they would have gone on paying. Can anything 
be more absurd? 

There is a square in New York — Stuyvesant Square — 
it is locked up at six o'clock every evening, even on long 
summer evenings. Why is it locked up? Why are the 
children not allowed to play there ? Why, because old Mr. 
Stuyvesant, dead and gone I don't know how many years 
ago, so willed it. Now, can anything be more absurd? 

Yet, that is not any more absurd than our land titles. 
From whom do they come? Dead man after dead man. 
Suppose you get on the cars here going to Council Bluffs 
or Chicago. You find a passenger with his baggage 
strewn over the seats. You say, "Will you give me a 
seat, if you please, sir?" He replies, "No; I bought this 
seat." "Bought this seat ? From v/hom did you buy it ?" 
"I bought it from the man who got out at the last 
station." That is the way we manage this earth of ours. 

Is it not a self-evident truth, as Thomas Jefferson 
said, that "the land belongs in usufruct to the living," 
and that they who have died have left it, and have no 
power to say how it shall be disposed of ? Title to land ! 
Where can a man get any title which makes the earth 
his property? 

There is a sacred right to property — sacred because 
ordained by the laws of nature, that is to say, by the 
law of God, and necessary to social order and civiliza- 
tion. That is the right of property in things produced 
by labor; it rests on the right of a man to himself. That 
which a man produces, that is his against all the world, to 
give or to keep, to lend, to sell or to bequeath; but how 



30 The Crime of Poverty. 

can he get such a right to land when it was here before 
he came? Individual claims to land rest only on appro- 
priation. I read in a recent number of the Nineteenth 
Century, possibly some of you have read it, an article by 
an ex-Prime Minister of AustraHa, in which there was 
a little story that attracted my attention. It was of a 
man named Galahard, who, in the early days, got up to 
the top of a high hill in one of the finest parts of Western 
Australia. He got up there, looked all round, and made 
his proclamation : "All the land that is in sight from the 
top of this hill I claim for myself : and all the land that 
is out of sight I claim for my son John." 

That story is of universal application. Land titles 
everywhere come from just such appropriation. Now, 
under certain circumstances, appropriation can give a 
right. You invite a company of gentlemen to dinner, 
and you say to them, "Be seated, gentlemen," and I get 
into this chair. Well, that seat, for the time being, is 
mine by the right of appropriation. It would be very 
ungentlemanly, it would be very wrong, for any of the 
other guests to come up and say, "Get out of that chair, 
I want to sit there !" But that right of possession, which 
is good so far as the chair is concerned for the time, 
does not give me a right to appropriate all there is on the 
table before me. Grant that a man has a right to appro- 
priate such natural elements as he can use, has he any 
right to appropriate more than he can use ? Has a guest, 
in such a case as I have supposed, a right to appropriate 
more than he needs, and make other people stand up? 
That is what is done. 

Why, look all over this country — look at this town 
or any other town. If men took only what they wanted 



The Crime of Poverty. 31 

to use we should all have enough ; but they take what 
they do not want to use at all. Here are a lot of English- 
men coming over here and getting titles to our land in 
vast tracts ; what do they want with our land ? They do 
not want it at all ; it is not the land they want ; they have 
no use for American land. What they want is the income 
that they know they can in a little while get from it. 
Where does that income come from? It comes from 
labor, from the labor of American citizens. What we are 
selling to these people is our children, not land. 

Poverty? Can there be any doubt of its cause? Go 
into the old countries — go into western Ireland, into the 
Highlands of Scotland ; there are purely primitive com- 
unities. There you will find people as poor as poor can 
be — living year after year on oatmeal or on potatoes, and 
often going hungry. I could tell you many a pathetic 
story. Speaking to a Scottish physician who was telling 
me how this diet was inducing among these people a 
disease similar to that which from the same cause is 
ravaging Italy (the Pellagra), I said to him: "There is 
plenty of fish; why don't they catch fish? There is 
plenty of game. I know the laws are against it, but 
cannot they take it on the sly?" "That," he said, "never 
enters their heads. Why, if a man was even suspected 
of having a taste for trout or grouse he would have to 
leave at once." There is no difficulty in discovering what 
makes those people poor. They have no right to any- 
thing that nature gives them. All they can make above a 
living they must pay to the landlord. They not only 
have to pay for the land that they use, but they have to 
pay for the seaweed that comes ashore and for the turf 



32 The Crime of Poverty. 

they dig from the bogs. They dare not improve, for any 
improvements they make are made an excuse for putting 
up the rent. These people who work hard, live in hovels, 
and the landlords, who do not work at all — oh! they 
live in luxury in London or Paris. If they have hunting 
boxes there, why, they are magnificent castles as com- 
pared with the hovels in which the men live who do the 
work. Is there any question as to the cause of the 
poverty there? 

Now, go into the cities, and what do you see? Why, 
you see even a lower depth of poverty; aye, if I would 
point out the worst evils of land monopoly I would not 
take you to Connemara ; I would not take you to Skye or 
Kintyre — I would take you to Dublin, or Glasgow or 
London. There is something worse than physical de- 
privation, something worse than starvation; and that is 
the degradation of the mind, the death of the soul. That 
is what you will find in those cities. 

Now, what is the cause of that? Why, it is plainly 
to be seen ; the people driven off the land in the country 
are driven into the slums of the cities. For every man 
that is driven off the land, the demand for the produce 
of the workmen of the cities is lessened; and the man 
himself, with his wife and children, is forced among 
those workmen to compete upon any terms for a bare 
living and force wages down. Get work he must or 
starve — get work he must, or do that which those people, 
so long as they maintain their manly feelings, dread more 
than death, go to the almshouse. That is the reason, 
here as in Great Britain, that the cities are overcrowded. 
Open the land that is locked up, that is held by dogs-in- 



The Crime of Poverty. 33 

the-manger, who will not use it themselves and will not 
allow anybody else to use it, and you would see no more 
of tramps and hear no more of over-production. 

The utter absurdity of this thing of private property 
in land ! I defy anyone to show me any good from it, 
look where you please. Go out to the new lands, where 
my attention was first called to it, or go to the heart of 
the capital of the world — London. Everywhere, when 
your eyes are once opened, you will see its inequality 
and you will see its absurdity. You do not have to go 
farther than Burlington. You have here a most beautiful 
site for a city, but the city itself, as compared with what 
it might be, is a miserable, straggling town. A gentle- 
man showed me today a big hole alongside one of your 
streets. The place has been filled up all around it, and 
this hole is left. It is neither pretty nor useful. Why 
does that hole stay there? Well, it stays there because 
somebody claims it as his private property. There is a 
man, this gentleman told me, who wished to grade an- 
other lot, and wanted somewhere to put the dirt he took 
off it, and he offered to buy this hole so that he might 
fill it up. Now, it would have been a good thing for 
Burlington to have it filled up, a good thing for you all — 
your town would look better, and you yourselves would 
be in no danger of tumbling into it some dark night. 
Why, my friend pointed out to me another similar hole 
in which water had collected, and told me that two 
children had been drowned there. And he likewise told 
me that a drunken man some years ago had fallen into 
such a hole, and had brought a suit against the city which 
cost you taxpayers some $11,000. Clearly it is to the 
interests of you all to have that particular hole I am 



34 The Crime of Poverty. 

talking of filled up. The man who wanted to fill it up 
offered the hole-owner $300. But the hole-owner refused 
the offer, and declares he will hold out until he can get 
$1,000; and, in the meanwhile, that unsightly and dan- 
gerous hole must remain. That is but an illustration of 
private property in land. 

You may see the same thing all over this country. 
See how injuriously in the agricultural districts this thing 
of private property in land affects the roads and the 
distances between the people. A man does not take what 
land he wants, what he can use; but he takes all he can 
get, and the consequence is that his next neighbor has 
to go further along, people are separated from each other 
■further than they ought to be, to the increased difficulty 
of production, to the loss of neighborhood and compan- 
ionship. They have more roads to maintain than they 
can decently maintain ; they must do more work to get the 
same result, and life is in every way harder and drearier. 

When you come to the cities, it is just the other way. 
In the country the people are too much scattered ; in the 
great cities they are too crowded. Go to a city like 
New York, and there they are jammed together like 
sardines in a box, living family upon family, one above 
the other. It is an utterly unnatural and unwholesome 
life. How can you have anything like a home in a tene- 
ment of two or three rooms? How can children be 
brought up healthily with no place to play? Two or 
three weeks ago I read of a New York judge who fined 
two little boys five dollars for playing hop-scotch on the 
street — where else could they play? Private property in 
land had robbed them of all place to play. Even a tem- 
perance man, who had investigated the subject, said that 



The Crime of Poverty. 35 

in his opinion the gin palaces of London were a positive 
good in this, that they enabled the people whose abodes 
were dark and squalid rooms to see a little brightness, 
and thus prevent them from going wholly mad. 

What is the reason for this overcrowding of cities? 
There is no natural reason. Take New York, one-half 
of its area is not built upon. Why, then, must people 
crowd together as they do there? Simply because of 
private ownership of land. There is plenty of room to 
build houses, and plenty of people who want to build 
houses, but before anybody can build a house a blackmail 
price must be paid to some dog-in-the-manger. It costs, 
in many cases, more to get vacant ground upon which 
to build a house than it does to build the house. And then 
what happens to the man who pays this blackmail and 
builds a house? Down comes the tax-gatherer and fines 
him for building the house. 

It is so all over the United States — the men who 
improve, the men who turn the prairie into farms, and 
the desert into gardens, the men who beautify your 
cities, are taxed and fined for having done these things. 
Now, nothing is clearer than that the people of New 
York want more houses ; and I think that even here in 
Burlington you could get along with more houses. Why, 
then, should you fine a man that builds one? Look all 
over this country — the bulk of the taxation rests upon 
the improver; the man who puts up a building or estab- 
lishes a factory, or cultivates a farm, he is taxed for it; 
and not merely taxed for it, but I think, in nine cases out 
of ten, the land which he uses, the bare land, is taxed 
more than the adjoining lot, or the adjoining 160 acres 



36 The Crime of Poverty. 

that some speculator is holding as a mere dog-in-the- 
manger, not using it himself, and not allowing anybody 
else to use it. 

I am talking too long; but let me, in a few words, 
point out the way of getting rid of land monopoly, 
securing the right of all to the elements which are neces- 
sary for life. We could not divide the land. In a rude 
state of society, as among the ancient Hebrews, giving 
each family its lot, and making it inalienable, we might 
secure something like equality. But in a complex civil- 
ization that will not suffice. It is not, however, necessary 
to divide up the land. All that is necessary is to divide 
up the income that comes from the land. In that way we 
can sectire absolute equality; nor could the adoption of 
this principle involve any rude shock or violent change. 
It can be brought about gradually and easily by abolish- 
ing the taxes that now rest upon capital, labor, and im- 
provements, and raising all our public revenues by the 
taxation of land values ; and the longer you think of it 
the clearer you will see that in every possible way it will 
be a benefit. 

Now, supposing we should abolish all other taxes, 
direct and indirect, substituting for them a tax upon 
land values, what would be the effect ? In the first place, 
it would be to kill speculative values. It would be to 
remove from the newer parts of the country the bulk of 
the taxation, and put it on the richer parts. It would be 
to exempt the pioneer from taxation, and make the larger 
cities pay more of it. It would be to relieve energy and 
enterprise, capital and labor, from all those burdens that 
now bear upon them. What a start that would give to 



The Crime of Poverty. 37 

production ! In the second place, we could, from the 
value of land, not merely pay all the present expenses 
of government, but we could do infinitely more. In the 
city of San Francisco, James Lick left a few blocks of 
ground to be used for public purposes there, and the 
rent amounts to so much, that out of it will be built the 
largest telescope in the world, large public baths, and 
other public buildings, and various costly monuments. If, 
instead of these few blocks, the whole value of the land 
upon which the city is built had accrued to San Fran- 
cisco, what could she not do ? 

So in this little town, where land values are very 
low as compared with such cities as Chicago and San 
Francisco, you could do many things for mutual benefit 
and public improvement did you appropriate to public 
purposes the land values that now go to individuals. 
You could have a great free library; you could have an 
art gallery; you could get yourselves a public park, a 
magnificent public park, too. You have here one of the 
finest natural sites for a beautiful town that I know of, 
and I have traveled much. You might make on this site 
a city that it would be a pleasure to live in. You will 
not, as you go now — oh! no! Why, the very fact that 
you have a magnificent view here will cause somebody 
to hold on all the more tightly to the land that commands 
this view, and charge higher prices for it. The State of 
New York wants to buy a strip of land so as to enable 
the people to see the Niagara, but what a price she must 
pay for it. Look at all the great cities ; in Philadelphia, 
for instance, in order to build their great city hall they 
had to block up the only two wide streets they had in the 



38 The Crime of Poverty. 

city. Everywhere you go you may see how private 
property in land prevents pubUc as well as private 
improvement. 

But I have no time to enter further into details. I 
can only ask you to think upon this thing, and the more 
you will see its desirability. As an English friend of 
mine puts it, "No taxes and a pension for everybody;" 
and why should it not be ? To take land values for public 
purposes is not really to impose a tax, but to take for 
public purposes a value created by the community. And 
out of the fund which would thus accrue from the com- 
mon property, we might, without degradation to anybody, 
provide enough to actually secure from want all who 
were deprived of their natural protectors, or met with 
accident; or any man who should grow so old that he 
could not work. All prating that is heard from some 
quarters about its hurting the common people to give 
them what they do not work for is humbug. The truth 
is, that anything that injures self-respect, degrades, does 
harm ; but if you give it as a right, as something to which 
every citizen is entitled, it does not degrade. Charity 
schools do degrade the children that are sent to them, but 
public schools do not. 

But all such benefits as these, while great, would be 
incidental. The great thing would be that the reform I 
propose would tend to open opportunities to labor and 
enable men to provide employment for themselves. That 
is the great advantage. We should gain the enormous 
productive power that is going to waste all over the 
country, the power of idle hands that would gladly be at 
work. And that removed, then you would see wages 
begin to mount. It is not that everyone would turn 



The Crhne of Poverty. 39 

farmer, or everyone build himself a house if he had an 
opportunity for doing so, but so many could, and would, 
as to relieve the pressure on the labor market and provide 
employment for all others. And as wages mounted to 
the higher levels then you would see the productive power 
increased. The country where wages are high is the 
country of greatest productive power. Where wages are 
highest there will invention be most active; there will 
labor be most intelligent ; there will be the greatest yield 
for the expenditure of exertion. The more you think of 
it the more clearly you will see what I say is true. I 
cannot hope to convince you in talking for an hour or 
two, but I shall be content if I shall put you upon inquiry. 
Think for yourselves ; ask yourselves whether this wide- 
spread fact of poverty is not a crime, and a crime for 
which everyone of us, man and woman, who does not 
do what he or she can do to call attention to it and to 
do away with it, is responsible. 




''"^emut^y 






C' 






^A V^ 















> O C\^ t^ 'n 




r 4 








■> ^5 '^ ■ A^ , I R <"•- -^ , ^ - \ - 






■0 N 



>-^' 



'^^ "% ^ 




^^i;^^^ >^^- 






-> .0- 






^^'^ 



■.^" 



X' 









^.c.*^- 
.X^^' 



> 



%<^- 









vV 'ct 



o>- 



. f^-,, i^ - "^ -^ 



5 <> 






•>* V 



-^. C*^ 



-^ 







Z^- 




-•':4^%'°'\>' 


•>* 


' - ■■ "H. v*' 





0- 



- 0' 






.'K 







1 



SEPT -68 

N. MANCHESTER. 



